138 TEACHERs COLLEGE COLUmbIA UNIvERsITy
Drawing bodies: A Kinaesthetics of Attention
drawing out a plane on a flat piece of paper. But
we also do so in countless implicit ways all of the
time, drawing out subtle or forceful planes into our
world. We construct our sense of space.
Even the notion of a stable, enduring space is
something that we must work to draw together.
Anyone who has tried to memorize the movements
of classic anatomy, described as they are in relation-
ship to abstract planes, will recall the remarkable
effort it takes to first locate a sense of those refer-
ence planes. You wind up having to hold yourself
in odd configurations and perspectives, playing
at being dead and then moving yourself, in order
to make sense of the terminology. So even in this
limit case—this game of imagining space to be
fixed, immutable, and indifferent to the movements
expressed within it—we find ourselves constantly
making and unmaking planes. We establish and
re-establish variations on them with subtle or overt
movements of our bodies, our balance, our eyes,
our hands. A plane, in short, is something we draw
out.
Indeed, we can only really experience a plane
in relationship to other possible planes. To bring
a plane into being one has to move off of it, draw
it out. Planes are always partial, turning into view,
“a good start.” The idea of drawing out an entire
plane is in some quite tangible sense inconceivable.
Which is to say, the idea is itself a kind of shorthand
gesture: “take this to go on forever....” It’s a move we
make. Oddly, it is a mathematician, Henri Poincaré
(1905), who articulates the active, kinaesthetic gen-
eration of geometric space most forcefully:
...Sight and touch could not have given
us the idea of space without the help of
the “muscular sense.” Not only could this
concept not be derived from a single sen-
sation, or even from a series of sensations;
but a motionless being could never have
acquired it, because, not being able to cor-
rect by his movements the effects of the
change of position of external objects, he
would have had no reason to distinguish
them from changes of state. Nor would he
have been able to acquire it if his move-
ments had not been voluntary, or if they
were unaccompanied by any sensations
whatever. (p. 59)Far from simply being gridded up by the Car-tesian planes of universal space, we are constantly
moving and sketching out new planes, making for-
ays of space.Line quality
What would be gained by having an experiential
taxonomy of the line? (What conversely, would a
taxonomy be without its lines?) Much seems to be
at stake in doing this well. On the one hand, the
drawing of lines is a way of crossing disciplines, of
establishing connections across divisions. Drawing,
in this sense, is naturally exploratory and inter-dis-
ciplinary. We navigate the corridors of the disci-
plined space of the school by wending a particular
and idiosyncratic line through it all. We draw out
the trajectory of our education. On the other hand,
it is the drawing out of lines in the sand, separating
out this area from another, that allows for the disci-
plinary structure in the first place. What keeps the
lines we weave across disciplines from simply estab-
lishing new fixed structure for us to rail against?
Can we imagine a dynamic and interdisciplinary
taxonomy of the line?
Perhaps we would have to find a new way of
thinking about the relationship between lines and
planes—one that didn’t establish domains within an
abstract space, but instead expressed the essentially
dynamic and moving quality of space itself. Deleuze
and Guattari, in their book, A Thousand Plateaus,
(1987) talk about a “plane of immanence,” which,
unlike a traditional plane, cannot be moved in rela-
tion to or “transcended.” But this doesn’t mean that
movement is precluded. Rather movement becomes
an expression of the plane itself. We move not from
one plane to another, but instead find ourselves in
constant relationship to a mobile, immanent field of
coherence.
One could say that just as Derrida challenged
the classic hierarchy of speech and mark-mak-
ing, Deleuze and Guattari have flipped the usual
assumption that movement is expressed within, and
defined by the coordinates of a prior stable space.
Rather, space itself is an expression of movement.
The plane of immanence adjusts to maintain consis-
tency with the varied movements of life.
Perhaps one way of imagining this plane of
immanence is to evoke the notion of hyperbolic
space, organized around a non-Euclidean geom-
etry that, unlike uniform Cartesian space, actually
increases in relationship to itself. A kind of excess
of space, long thought a mere abstraction, a theory